Mediatised Public Crisis and the racialisation of African youth in Australia

Abstract

In this paper I analyse how African populations living in Melbourne have been constituted as racially ‘other’ subjects through intensive mediatisation and politicisation of a small number of violent events. The events themselves offer little support for the thesis that African refugees are prone to violence as a consequence of racial and cultural attributes, yet this is precisely the message conveyed through media reporting. This presents serious challenges for Africans living in Australia, and for others who accept racialising discourses, as well as for social cohesion in Australia. The analysis will rely on print media reporting in Melbournein 2007-2008 in order to demonstrate how the social fields of police work, journalism and politics interact to produce distinctiveracialising effects.

In late 2007, after two months of heavy reporting focused on groups of young men most often profiled as African or Sudanese, the Melbourne tabloid Herald-Sun published the following editorial:

We are in the grip of a violence epidemic, fuelled by four persistent factors: alcohol, groups of young males, illegal weapons and, increasingly, cultural differences involving immigrant youths.(A stab in the darkness, 2007)

This thesis is purportedly demonstrated foremost bythreeviolent incidents. On Wednesday September 26 2007 Liep Gony, a 19-year-old student who came to Australia from Sudan in 1999, was bashed at a train station in the Melbourne suburb of NoblePark. He died 24 hours later from his injuries andtwo ‘white’ men were subsequently charged with his murder. On the day before his funeral, another refugee from Sudan, Ajang Gor, was bashed in the suburb of Melton, and his family sent racist text messages on his stolen mobile phone. On November 29, in a third Melbourne suburb, police made violent arrests at a housing estate, describing the event as ‘a riot’ provoked by ‘African youths’.

From late September to early December 2007,‘African youth’ were consequently the object of intense media attention in Australia. Reporting took on an explicitly political dimension after the Minister for Immigration commented on Liep Gony’s murder that some groups ‘don’t seem to be settling and adjusting into the Australian life as quickly as we would hope’ (Topsfield & Rood, 2007). This ‘failure to integrate’ was given as justification for a cut in the number of humanitarian visas allocated to Africans from 70% to 30% (Topsfield, 2007, p. 2).

The processes of racialisation which I identify here are shaped by previous episodes in which race came to offer an explanation of social relations and rights. The framing of the incidents resonates strongly with that established by the ‘Tampa Crisis’ of 2001, and ‘children overboard’ affair, in which the government used the plight of refugees attempting to reach Australia to play on xenophobic fears and win that year’s Federal election (Gale, 2004). It also resonates with anti-Muslim and anti-Arab/Lebanese sentiment in its focus on young men constituted as‘ethnic crime gangs’ identified by appearance(Anti-Discrimination Board of New South Wales, 2003; Collins, 2000).This racism is felt widely within the targeted populations (Poynting & Noble, 2004), with the relationship between vilification and persecution most visible in the Cronulla Riots of 2005 (Poynting, 2006). Common to all of these episodes is the central role of the media in promoting racialised accounts. Racialisation is understood here as ‘the cultural or political processes or situations where race is involved as an explanation or a means of understanding’ (Murji & Solomos, 2005, p. 11). The media, in these instances, construct what has been termed a mediatised or mediated public crisis (Cottle, 2004, p. 2; McCallum, 2007, p. 1).

How then can we consider the relationship between a given set of events, their interpretation as having a racial quality, and the workings of the media? The work of politicians must also be considered if this set of relationships is to be analysed. While Fairclough (2000) uses the term mediatisation to describe how government seeks to use and manage the media, I am concerned here with the ways in which the media take up events as policy issues, even when they only weakly relate to a specific already-existing government policy – a practice theorised by Lingard and Rawolle (Lingard & Rawolle, 2004). By mediatisation, therefore, I refer to the process of symbolic transformation whereby any given event becomes a media event (Bourdieu, 1998).

Bourdieu’s theorisation of social fields offers a useful approach for examining the movement of events across law-enforcement and judicial, journalistic and political domains. A ‘temporary social field’ (Rawolle, 2005) is constituted by the attention granted to violent events involving African refugees. The structure of this temporary social field is derived from cross-field positionality of a small group of mobile agents. In particular, members of the police force play a critical role in setting the dynamic of this temporary social field.

Bourdieu’s analytical framework distinguishes a set of social fields, each of which operates autonomously according to somewhat distinctive principles of social value and participation. These fields call forth distinctive positional strategies from those agents competing for the symbolic or material stakes of each field (which Bourdieu terms capital). Social fields are organised within a wider field of social power, which provides the basis for the exchange of capital accumulated in various fields.

Here I am concerned with the relationships of fields contributing to what Bourdieu has termed the ‘journalistic field’ (Bourdieu, 1998). Bourdieu (1998) suggests that the logic of the journalistic field tends to distort objects which come to its attention, and that the true objects of media attention are internally produced realities, developed according to the structural properties of the field. These include the search for the novel, the rapid news cycle, the need for articulate spokespeople, and the desire for ratings (Bourdieu, 1998, pp. 21-23). All of these elements are determined by the particular susceptibility of the journalistic field to commercial imperatives emerging from the economic and political fields. In this sense, journalism is a ‘dominated field’ which ‘tends to reinforce the ‘commercial’ elements at the core of all fields to the detriment of the “pure”’ (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 70).

The relationship of the political field to the journalistic field and to policy remains somewhat ambiguous in Bourdieu’s work. He writes that ‘in a certain way, the journalistic field is part of the political field on which it has such a powerful impact’ (1998, p. 76).

The journalistic field threatens the autonomy of others by supporting actors from other fields who are ‘most inclined to yield to the seduction of “external” profits precisely because they are less rich in capital specific to the field’ (74). In order to analyse below the consequences of this movement across fields of heteronomous agents, I draw on the concept of ‘cross-field effects’ developed by Lingard and Rawolle (Lingard & Rawolle, 2004; Rawolle, 2005). These effects, which are the result of mediatisation, impact on policy, and micro-social relations through the production of a ‘temporary social field’, whose structures are ‘derived from the relationships between the fields of journalism and the fields of politics, derived from the social fact that they share common stakes’ (Rawolle, 2005, p. 712).

Refugees in Australia

The Australian government currently has a target of 13,000 new arrivals per year through its humanitarian program. In 2005/2006 grants to people from Africa comprised 55.65 per cent of this intake; grants to people from the Middle East and South West Asia comprised 33.98 per cent; and grants to people from the Asia/Pacific region comprised 9.88 per cent (Australian Government, 2007).

Refugees from Africa began forming an important part of Australia’s humanitarian entry program from the end of the 1990s, but still make up less than 1% of the population. This intake has been drawn from linguistically and ethnically diverse populations, primarily from the Horn of Africa, but also from countries in West Africa. As the largest number come from Sudan, ‘Sudanese’ is often used to cover all ‘Black’ refugees. As we shall see below, in media representations refugees from Africa are often presented as being members of a single community, with no ethnic or linguistic boundaries recognised andnation often standing for ‘race’. However Sudan, to take one example, counts over 600 ethnic groups and 400 languages(Levinson, 1998, p. 170). These groups have a complex history and encompass wide-ranging cultural and religious differences, as well as economic and social distinctions (Levinson, 1998, p. 170-172). The projection of ‘orientalist’ fantasies (Said, 1995) on a heterogeneous African population primarily on the basis of appearance is made possible by ignorance of such distinctions.

The study

The study consists of analysis of print media articles from Melbourne newspapers relating to the events outlined at the start of the paper. Articles from the Herald-Sun, The Australian (both News Limited) and The Age (Fairfax) appearing from September 26, 2007, when Gony was bashed, to December 3 2007, when attention subsided, have been included in the analysis. A total of 222 news and opinion articles published over the period were identified using the ‘Factiva’ data-base.

I draw on the tools of critical discourse analysis. I will therefore discuss media portrayals in terms of ‘frames’, by which I mean the construction of narratives through the selection, ordering and manipulation of perspectives and experiences to produce a particular ideological meaning (Gamson, Croteau, Hoynes, & Sasson, 1992; Gitlin, 2003; Iyengar, 1991; Kendall, 2005; Norris, Just, & Kern, 2003). My ultimate objective is to clarify the roles of various agents contributing to the ‘temporary social field’ constituted by media attention to African refugees in Melbourne.

The role of the police

The reliance of journalists on particular ‘beats’ on regular institutional sources, such as the police, as a matter of both efficiency and routine (Gans, 2004; Sigal, 1973), has a powerful structuring effect on media frames. The ‘local talk’ (McCallum, 2005) of police, although it may be expressed in particular ways in the presence of journalists, plays a powerful double role in constituting public opinion. It is transformed from the ‘localised’ public opinion grounded in discussionof experience and media consumption into mediated public opinion, often covertly, through the offices of journalists on crime beats. The same forces of police organisational culture which influence individual police officers are relayed far beyond their originating contexts by virtue of this symbiotic relationship.

In this case, newspapers develop a commitment to racialising narratives of urban decay and violence presented by police, and then prioritise stories which appear to fit in to this narrative. Internationally, the role of the police in processes of racialisation has been well established since Stuart Hall’s seminal Policing the Crisis(1978). It is evident in the widespread and routine harassment and identity checks carried out on visible minorities by police (Chan & Mirchandani, 2002; Holdaway, 1996; Poynting, 2001), with institutional police racism in Australia brought to greatest focus in recent times through the inquiry into Aboriginal deaths in custody (Johnston, 1991).

Police racism towards African refugees in Australiahas also begun to be documented. An internal police report leaked to the press during the events analysed here made adverse findings in relation to complaints made by young African men of harassment, assault and racial abuse(Porter, 2007, p. 5). Recent research in Melbourne on refugee youth aged 12-20, (85% of whom were born in Africa) has also reported that half of males and a fifth of females were stopped and questioned by police in the first two years of settlement (Refugee Health Research Centre, 2007). Comments from participants in the study reveal resentment of racial profiling:

A police car pulls over and they’re like ‘are you guys a gang or something?’‘No we’re just friends, we’re walking’… Just a group of kids walking together doesn’t mean they’re a gang! (Ethiopian male 15 years old in (Refugee Health Research Centre, 2007, p. 2)

As Police are given the first and greatest authority to name and define the crimes they are called to, it is unsurprising that it is their labels and descriptions which are taken up and remain affixed through subsequent reporting. At the outset of media attention instigated by the bashing of Liep Gony, reports focus on the story that ‘ethnic gang violence has erupted on suburban Melbourne streets’, with extensively quoted ‘local officers’, complaining that ‘they [the Sudanese] walk around in packs’(Kerbaj, 2007, p. 8). Police are backed up by anonymous ‘residents’ in the characterisation of Sudanese as having a ‘gang mentality’ resulting in ‘ugly clashes with other migrant groups’. The bashing of Gony is primarily newsworthy initially due to the incorrect assumption that it is a ‘savage gang-related attack’. The implications of the labelling so freely used in this reporting, which point to the working hypothesis used by police in approaching any incidents involving ‘problem groups’, are discussed in the next section.

Defining a problem group

Definition of a racialised ‘problem group’ is achieved here most obviously through ‘over-lexicalisation’ (Teo, 2000): the density of epithets relating to racial, age, collective and migration attributes (see Table 1 below). At least one descriptor from all four categories is used in every article reviewedin relation tothe ‘problem group’, in addition to the specification that it is ‘men’ who are the problem. Moral qualities more rarely appear as labels (column 6), but rather are conveyed through more elaborate means analysed further in the next section. Even when identification is suppressed in court proceedings, race may explicitly excluded, as in the case of a magistrate’s ruling that‘I don't think his name should be mentioned, only that he is Sudanese and he comes from the Dandenong area’(Roberts, Anderson, & Sikora, 2007, p. 4).

While Africans may be residents of a given suburb, they are rarelydescribed as locals. Geographically, the suburbs where migrants live are portrayed as besieged by outsiders and cut off from the city. They are ‘no-go zones’ (Mitchell, 2007, p. 25), ‘African, Asian and Polynesian strongholds’, ‘hotspots’ and ‘hotbeds’ for ‘youth violence and ethnic tensions’ (Lloyd-McDonald, 2007, p. 3). This identification lost territory and invasion is emphasised by references to an idyllic past time. A ‘75-year-old widow’, who is a ‘local’, laments that before the invasion, ‘the area used to be “lovely”’ (Crawford, 2007, p. 4).

The descriptors in Table 1 all stand in for appearance in some way, as it is appearance which primarily forms the basis for profiling. This is recognised by those who are subjected to profiling: ``We are black and we stand out, so we are targets’, a ‘rake-thin Sudanese youth’ is quoted as observing (Franklin, 2007a). Note in the above extract that ‘race’ is by build by the reporter. African sources are constantly objectified and racialised through such references to build (‘skinny’ and ‘tall’) and demeanour (‘defiant’, ‘swaggering’). Farouque and Cook report of Noble Park that ‘their skin tone, height and clothing and a certain defiant attitude make these Sudanese-born youths stand out’ (Farouque & Cooke, 2007, p. 3). Height in particular is frequently evoked in relation to the Sudanese, with a man appearing in court unusually described as ‘the 188cm teenager’ (Roberts et al., 2007, p. 4). In the articles reviewed, height is never used to describe any other non-African individual or group referred to.

Commonly, the ‘over-lexicalised’ ‘problem group’ is counterposed with ‘locals’ or ‘residents’, who are implicitly white (Table 2). These ‘deracialised’ individuals tend to be identified only by profession and individual age. When reports emerged of arrests made in relation to the bashing of Liep Gony (associated with least 4 of the descriptors in Table 1 per article), those arrested are described first as ‘three people’(Bashing arrests, 2007, p. 7). They are given exact ages (22, 19, 17), and reference is not made to their youth. They are ‘two men and a woman’, not youths or teenagers or migrants or of any particular background (Bashing arrests, 2007, p. 7). On the following day, it is revealed that ‘Mr Gony’s alleged attackers were not African’, and the suspects aged over 18 are named (Farouque, Petrie, & Miletic, 2007, p. 2). By October 6, the ‘race’ of the attackers is finally made explicit: ‘three white people have been charged over the incident’ (Farouque & Cooke, 2007, p. 3). Even though deracialised figures by definition are bereft of racial attributes, here they are added for clarification that they are not part of the ‘problem group’.

Police are defined more simply yet by rank. Only once is a police officer racially profiled; when the ‘irony’ of a ‘Sri Lankan-born detective’ asking ‘raucous Sudanese’ to disperse is pointed out (Bolt, 2007b). The irony lies, presumably, in the fact that this officer is not white, and so does not fit the deracialised profile of the ‘normal’ police officer.

Table 1: Common descriptors for ‘African refugees’*

Racial attributes / Collective attributes / Age attributes / Migration attributes / locality / Moral qualities
African
‘North African’
Of African descent’
Black
Sudanese
‘Sudanese-born’ / a mob
packs
a gang
gangs
a group
community / youth(s)
kids
children
under-age teenagers
teens
juvenile / refugees
immigrants
migrants / residents / delinquent
lawless
thugs offenders

*Articles appearing in Melbourne September 26 – December 3 2007.

Table 2: Common descriptors for other lay sources/ ‘deracialised’ groups referred to*

Racial attributes / Collective attributes / Age attributes / Migration attributes / Locality / Moral qualities
White
Caucasian
Non-African / ‘the community’
‘the people’ / [age]-year-old / ‘long-term Australians’
locally-born / locals
residents
‘long-time residents’
home-grown
neighbours
‘local businesses’

*articles appearing in Melbourne September 26 – December 3 2007.

Behind the labelling often lies the thesis of an African ‘culture of violence’. Assistant Commissioner Paul Evans claim that investigators are ‘dealing with refugees who had come from a culture of boy soldiers and social violence’(Evans, 2007b, p. 3). Elsewhere the commissioner explains `this is a cultural thing. A lot of these people are brought up as warriors in their own country' (Mitchell, 2007, p. 25). Police are reportedly fearful ‘of the emergence of militant street gangs of young African refugees who have served in militia groups in their war-ravaged homelands’ (Kerbaj, 2007, p. 8). This perspective is relayed by columnists. Andrew Bolt in the Herald-Sun claims that ‘Sudanese men come from a warlike culture and arc up more quickly than most when in a group’ (2007b, p. 34), while Neil Mitchell in the same newspaper suggests an animal quality with his evocation of ‘groups of young men hunting in packs’ (2007, p. 25).